


I'm you, but illegal

by Tabata



Series: Leoverse [312]
Category: Glee
Genre: Alternate Universe, Con Artists, Cybercrimes, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-24
Updated: 2021-02-24
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:41:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,700
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29684115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabata/pseuds/Tabata
Summary: The FBI is suffering a cyber-attack and agent Vanderbilt is convinced that there's Leonard Karofsky Hummel — one of Anderson's kids — behind it. Too bad said kid hasn't left his bed in a week. Can his first suspect turn into the solution in time?
Relationships: Blaine Anderson/Original Male Character(s), Original Male Character/Original Male Character
Series: Leoverse [312]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/30541





	I'm you, but illegal

**Author's Note:**

> **WARNING:** This story is an **AU** from the original 'verse. What happens in here has little to none correlation with what happens in Leonard Karofsky-Hummel VS The world or Broken Heart Syndrome. The characters involved are (mostly) the same, but situations and relationships between them may be completely different.  
> In this particular verse Blaine and the boys (and girl) are a criminal team, very much like the one you can find in certain kind of movies or tv series (anyon said Leverage?), that's specialized in thefts. At some point, Federal Agent Sam Vanderbilt (yes, she finally has a surname) made a deal with them: all their records will be erased (in time) if they start working with the government.
> 
>   
> Written for: Lande di Fandom's COW-T #11 (Week 3 - M2)  
> prompt: Cyberwarfare
> 
>   
> Yes (once again) Leo's hacker jargon is absolute gibberish. I know nothing about hackers, computers, coding or whatever, and I didn't care to learn it either. I used [this](http://shinytoylabs.com/jargon/#) and a couple of other pages. It was really fun :)  
> 

Lima, Ohio, United States. 34° F, 76% of humidity. According to WLIO's weather forecast: Rain showers along with windy conditions. Snow may mix in. Winds SSW at 20 to 30 mph. Chance of rain 90%.

A normal day of late February, except for the front door exploding inwards and the entire S.W.A.T. team pouring in. Leading the charge, Sam Vanderbilt, current head of the FBI with a bone to pick with the inhabitants of safe house 3056, courtesy issued to them by the FBI itself.

They don't keep weapons in the house, and even if they did, they wouldn't use them now. Blaine has a strict rule against weapons – especially in the event of reacting to police intervention – and they all abide to it. So they all do the only sensible thing to do in this circumstances. They let the S.W.A.T. team rough them up a bit. This is what these people are paid for, after all, and it would be unfair to the taxpayers not to let them do their job.

Matt throws himself at the agents – He's 6'4”, so there's a lot to throw – and they slam him to the floor and keep him there. It takes three men to keep Matt down. The guy is not inherently aggressive if he doesn't want to be, but he likes to give these people a run for their money. Besides, he wants to take the attention away from Cody, standing just a few feet away.

It is hard not to notice Cody in his black shorts and oversize hoodie. The agent who grabs him is overzealous and he must think Cody is going to try and escape his ironclad grip as he pins him very hard against the wall and presses himself against his back. Cody lets him because at this point he learned two things. One, resisting arrest always leads to more problems than enduring ten minutes of harassment. Two, no matter what side they're on – and these police agents are in a bit of a gray area – some men have the general tendency to be gross when they get to be around him and there is nothing he can do about it.

They try the same with Annie, but she's not as meek as Cody and she fights back, stomping ferociously on the agent's foot with her $695.00 Louboutin. He's wearing heavy duty boots, but he feels it anyway. He cusses and slams her head against the wall a little harder than needed, but she smiles anyway. It was all worth it. 

Adam gets agitated. He had made no resistance, but the moment they touch her, his brain goes berserk. Another agent throws him on the floor and keeps him at gunpoint, nipping his rebellion in the bud. 

Blaine watches everything from where he stands on the kitchen door with his arms raised over his head, making sure his kids are alright. He does his best not to show his concern for what is happening right now. His face is a mask of mild-concealed annoyance.

“Vanderbilt, what's going on? Didn't they teach you how to ring doorbells in Quantico?”

Sam Vanderbilt comes to stand right in the middle of the living room, the standard S.W.A.T. issued uniform failing to conceal her statuesque body. She looks one step away from losing her temper and that is always a very good look on her. “I'm not in the mood, Anderson. Where is he?”

“Who?” Blaine asks. “We don't harbor any fugitive if that is what this is all about.”

“Leonard. The FBI is currently facing a full-scale cyberattack and I know it's your kid.”

“No, it's not,” Adam butts in laughing, before Blaine can tell her the same thing. “That knucklehead hasn't got out of bed in a week. You're probably being hacked by a bunch of middle-graders playing games in the computer science lab.”

Vanderbilt throws Blaine an unconvinced look, which is quite offensive. “And you expect me to believe that?”

Blaine feels like they moved past the seek and destroy phase and that it is safe to lower his hands, even if slowly. “I don't expect you to do anything, agent, I'm well aware that you march to the beat of your own drum and all that,” he says. “I can only offer you the truth. As Adam said, Leo is not feeling very well at the moment.”

“That is a kid that I personally saw hacking a multinational corporation's systems with a 102° F fever and a broken arm, dangling upside down from the seventh floor,” Vanderbilt insists, “and you want me to trust you that he's not able to crack the FBI system from the comfort of his own bed?”

Blaine's jaw tenses as his whole posture changes from welcoming to defensive. “ _That_ is a kid with mental illness issues that you and your people have consistently refused to acknowledge or straight out exploited to force our hand. So I suggest you to tread lightly on the matter if it is any measure of collaboration that you're looking for here.”

The tension in the room rises beyond the safe level, and they can all feel it. As Blaine and Vanderbilt glower at each other, the agents' fingers twitch nervously over the triggers. Adam looks over at Annie and Matt, they have an entire conversation without speaking a word. It doesn't happen often that they find themselves in situations like this, but it's not their first time either and they have a plan. In fact, they have several, because Blaine never leaves _anything_ up to chance, especially not their lives.

Luckily, there is no need for any of those plans because tension deflates as it has risen. Vanderbilt is the first to give in, delivering the first round in Blaine's hands. “Fine,” she says, relaxing her shoulders and triggering the whole room to do the same. “If it's not him, I still need to speak with him.”

“No, what you need is to take a step back and tell me what is going on,” Blaine corrects her. Then, he gestures towards the couch. “Would you mind stop pointing weapons at my kids and have a seat?”

Vanderbilt nods briefly at her team and the agents let everybody go, but she doesn't sit down. “The attack started early this morning and it has been going on since then,” she explains, combing her long blonde hair with her fingers. “My IT guys are on it but they are not exactly at his level, are they?”

Blaine smiles his proudest father's smile. “See, you should have opened with that instead of kicking my door down. You would have made so many more friends!”

Vanderbilt rolls her eyes at him and she prefers not to dignify his words with a comment. “So far we've managed to keep the hackers out but we are losing ground as we speak. It's just a matter of time before they get in,” she says. “I don't have to tell you that there are sensible information that we must keep from them.”

“Of course there are,” Blaine sighs, knowingly. “You spend too much time gaining intelligence illegally and not enough time protecting it. Then every so often you find yourself in the same pickle. You see the flaw within this procedure, don't you?”

“We gain intelligence to protect this country, Anderson. Do you have any idea of how many people will be in danger if our system is breached?”

“I have a fairly accurate idea of how many foreign governments could be overthrown if those information got out,” he nods. “It would be a pity if someone else was to overthrow them before you do, wouldn't it?”

Vanderbilt looks at him with pure disappointment in her eyes. It is funny, Blaine thinks, how she always expects them to be automatically on her side only because they work for the FBI now. She seems to forget that they have no other choice. “Sometimes you really make it impossible to like you, you know that?”

“Says the woman who almost shot us all for no reason.”

“Oh, for fuck's sake, nobody was going to shoot you! Come on!” She finally snaps. “Have we done this enough or do you want to waste any more time? I swear to God, Anderson, you really are a piece of work! Let me talk to your boy.”

“No, you stay here and I do the talking,” Blaine corrects her. “He doesn't care for his own life right now, he won't care about yours. Let me handle this.”

Vanderbilt raises her hands in a conceding gesture and she finally sits down on the couch. “Do your magic, but do it fast,” she says. “We don't have much time.”

*

Blaine starts by drawing open the curtains.

If he remembers correctly, this room hasn't seen the light of day in three days, when he tried to open the window and Leo let out such a pitiful sound that he decided to wait a little longer.

“Kid, are you awake?”

Leo whimpers from underneath the entirety of the blankets he owns, all piled up one after the other, not for warmth but for comfort. He knows better, though, than to leave the answer at that. “I am.”

“Good,” Blaine sits down on the bed and combs Leo's hair back. “How do you feel? A bit better?”

“Bit better,” Leo repeats. They have been playing this game since Blaine took him in. Leo feels down, Blaine lets him be for a while – sometimes it's hours, sometimes it's days, never more than two weeks, though – then he asks if Leo feels a bit better and Leo always answers yes, no matter if it's true or not.

From that moment on he has to try and feel like he says he feels, because _we say no lies in this house_.

At first Leo thought it was just stupid to say nobody lies in this house when he was forced to lie about how he felt, but then he understood. It was Blaine's way to say “I understand you don't feel well, but now it's time to do something about it” without really saying it. Besides, trying to do something instead of lying down sometimes helps him actually not going back to lying down. It doesn't always work – sometimes some more time passes and Blaine has to pop the question over and over – but that's okay.

Asking and trying and not lying and asking again, it's all that they can do.

“I have big news for you,” Blaine smiles at him. “Guess who needs your help?”

Leo frowns. “Who?”

Blaine leans forward and places a little kiss on his forehead, on his nose and on his cheeks. “Agent Vanderbilt,” he murmurs, amused as he is sure Leo will be as soon as he knows. “She stormed in here with a S.W.A.T. team because she thought you were hackering the FBI. As it turns out, they are under attack and they need you.”

“Say that again?”

“Her IT guys are holding the fort but, apparently, they are losing ground as we speak,” Blaine goes on. “She openly said you are on another level.”

“Oh, she will have to repeat that when I can hear her,” Leo says. He tries to pull himself up, but his arms give in and he falls back on the mattress. “I will need a little boost. Like, a gallon of energy drinks.”

“You need your meds.”

“Or maybe I need both,” Leo nods. “It seems a sensible decision.”

“We'll see about that,” Blaine sighs, helping him out of the bed.

Leo drags himself to the bathroom, picking up clothes as he goes. “For something so big, we can ask something of value. Like, they will have to wipe Cody's records clean.”

“I already tried, kiddo. She said no, but she's willing to do that for Matt's.”

Leo sighs. “Fine,” he says, right before disappearing in the bathroom. “What the hell does she want to clean that fucking records? It's not like he killed anyone!”

“It's the only weapon she has.”

Leo will take it away from her sooner or later. 

He only needs five minute alone with the database he's about to save.

*

Less than a hour later, Blaine and Leo are in the FBI's headquarters, which seem to be in total chaos. People are running everywhere and for some reason, they are all screaming at each other as if that could hinder the hacker attack. There is something really funny in seeing how totally useless field agents are when they have nothing to shoot at.

Sam shows her badge to the guard at the entrance and then she leaves her gun, before walking through the metal detector. “They are with me,” she informs her colleague. That is not enough to give them a pass, though, and they have to go through the same procedure.

“We come here so often that we should have our own swipe cards at this point,” Leo complains, following her in one of those shiny elevators that get only up to a certain floor unless you have the right pass. “I mean, I have a favorite donut in your cafeteria. How sad is that?”

“I have a favorite donut,” Sam says.

“Point made.”

The room that has been readied to face the attack looks like the control room at NASA from where they land rovers on other planets. Lines and lines of desks, with people wearing headsets sitting at them, and a huge wall of screens, showing several different sets of data at the same time. Leo was about to make some snarky remark but the sight pushes all the right buttons inside his head, giving him that little shiver that out of bed only so many connected computers give him.

“I need something like this at home,” he says dreamily as he takes the whole room in. A few of the people stop working to look at him, but he's not seeing them. His line of sight occupied exclusively by top-of-the-line equipment and at least four prototypes that he has only read about on the dark net.

“Why, so you can commit more crimes?”

Leo frowns at her. “So I don't have to come here to commit those you ask for,” he replies, taking off his jacket and dropping it on the first available chair. “Alright, I don't know what's going on but I can already see that there are too many people here,” he says, raising his voice to make sure everybody can hear him. He would have hopped on a desk for effect, but the room has already a pretty good acoustic and he doesn't see the point of overkilling it right from the start. “I will only need three people. One, whoever is in charge of this circus right here. Two, someone, anyone, who can work on a Unicode COM Array without me holding their hand. Three, whoever wrote the FBI's Apache algorithm. That's it. The others can go.”

“Who the hell are you?” Someone asks from one of the desks at the end of the room.

“I'm the one who's gonna save your sorry asses,” Leo says, turning on his own laptop and connecting cables to it with swift, habitual movements. “And you are not one of the three people I need, I suppose. Where are the people I asked for? This operation must have a leader the FBI can blame if something goes wrong, right?”

“That would be me.” Leo turns around to see someone walking towards him and for a very confusing moment Leo feels like he's looking in a mirror. The guy is tall and skinny like himself, and he's got pretty much his curly black hair, his blue eyes and almost the same hoodie. He stops a few feet from his desk and smiles. “And I also wrote the Apache.”

“Good,” Leo murmurs, still mildly upset by his doppelganger. “Less people. And—you are?”

“I'm you but legal, I guess,” the guy chuckles and shakes his hand. “Name's Levi. I'm head of the Infosec team. Basically a glorified IT guy.”

“They tell me you're doing a great job.”

“Hey, they haven't gotten in yet, have they?” Levi defends himself.

Leo sighs. “I still need someone for the array.”

“I can take care of it,” Levi nods. “Don't worry.”

Leo looks at him and he tries to use what Blaine calls _the feeling_. The man says that you can size anyone up with one glance if you look hard enough and you listen to your body. People give off feelings, either good or bad. Leo thinks that Levi feels good. Or maybe it's just that he looks so much like him, Leo doesn't know.

“Alright, I keep my stunt double. Everybody out,” he says and in the mess of everybody getting up and leaving the room, he adds, “Vanderbilt, I will need a lot of energy drinks, like a gallon of coke, and Thai food. No, pizza. Wait, I have an idea, I'll have both and also cheeseburgers, like, lots of them. I stress eat.”

Vanderbilt shakes her head. “I'm not leaving this room, Leonard.”

“Well, send someone, then!” Leo sits down, taking position. A string of commands showering down on the screen of his laptop.

Vanderbilt frowns and turns to Blaine. “I thought you said he hadn't spoken a word in weeks,” he snorts. “He's quite annoying to be basically unresponsive.”

Blaine chuckles. “Leo is like a wind-up toy that is permanently winded up. He goes and goes and he keeps on going until he suddenly runs out of energy,” he explains. “And when that happens, he's not just tired, he's drained. He can't function properly unless you jump start him.”

“And you did that how?”

“Meds and energy drinks,” Leo calls from several feet away, showing that whatever he took gave him bat hearing or at least hyper-senses. “I'm basically high on Adderall and caffeine.”

“This is going to be fun,” Vanderbilt says, humorlessly.

“Okay, Levi, walk me through this,” Leo says, finally focusing on the task at hand. “They pretended to breach the mainframe, and they obviously failed because it's isolated, all the while trying to compress three of the back-ends to collapse the whole system.”

Levi nods. “How do you know that?”

“It is what I would have done,” Leo types something which triggers another sequence of data on his screen. “What have you done so far?”

“I'm overriding their keys.”

“And they keep re-rooting, right?”

Levi nods again. “It's been like this all day, they're not even changing strategy,” he says as the room explodes into a cacophony of beeps. “See? Here they go again.”

“What's happening?” Vanderbilt looks at one and then the other, not knowing which one of them she should rely on for information. “Are they in?”

“No, but they're knocking. It's just... “ Leo lets his chair slide along the line of desks, reading the screens one after the other. “This makes no sense.”

“What doesn't?”

Leo takes his sweet time and slides all the way back before answering. “It's a repeated knock, the same sequence over and over,” he says, knocking on the table rhythmically.

“If a key doesn't work, why try it again?”

Sometimes in the past forty minutes, someone brought Leo the food he requested. So he starts spinning on his office chair, picking up french fries every time he passes in front of them. As the computers keep blaring, Leo starts thinking. The FBI security system is not as flawed as he always says. He has been studying it for ages now – it would have been a blast to crack it when he was still like, fourteen or fifteen – and he knows very well that it is not exactly a masterpiece, but it is build to sustain damage. He has tried several times to get in, but the whole thing is programmed not to accept external re—

“Shit!”

“What?”

Leo pops a few more fries in his mouth. “This is a botnet”, he screams at Levi, moving from desk to desk and then hopping over the tables to reach more computers. “Get them offline! Now!”

“Fuck!” Levi is instantly set into motion, and he too starts sliding over the table and tears cables off. Some of the machines are just pushed to the ground and broken.

“Would one of you tell me why you're suddenly destroying government property?”

“It's an evil maid attack, agent Vanderbilt,” Levi answers.

“A what now? I swear to God, I'd rather deal with a fucking bomb than this,” she groans. “Give me something! A place to go, just narrow things down and point me somewhere! There must be a way to know where is the fucking basement these people are working from!”

“They are here,” Leo answers as he retrieves his computer and he starts typing furiously, Levi mimicking him a few desks over on a tablet. “I mean, inside. Or at least they have been here, like, a couple of days ago. An evil maid attack means someone was here to mess with your computers. They couldn't enter from outside, they needed something here. Something they are trying to activate with the repeating sequence.”

Now, that is something Vanderbilt can work with. “What is it?”

Leo shrugs. “It's impossible to say for sure,” he says. “But if I had to choose, I'd go with a messenger. It's a—a little black box the size of a Rubik cube, plugged in somewhere, quite possibly near a cluster of phones.”

“There are five hundreds offices on this floor alone.”

“You better start searching, then,” Leo snaps. “And when you find it, you absolutely do not unplug it. You report to me.”

Vanderbilt nods. She is so ready to get this over with that she is more than willing to ignore Leo's attitude towards her. If the kid can save the day, he can be bossy for a couple of hours. There will be time to put him back in his place. She turns on her earpiece with a tap and she passes on the information.

“Why don't you want them to unplug it?” Levi asks, sliding a little bit closer to him so he doesn't have to speak out loud. “That would stop them.”

“Only temporarily,” he mutters. Whenever Leo works on something, his attention progressively shifts from the reality around him to the reality on his screen, until he can't hear anything you say unless you physically enter his personal space. He wasn't aware of that when he was younger. He would just slide into his own world, completely impermeable to any external input. In time, he learned how to be conscious of it as it happens. So he knows that he's about halfway through, still hearing at least half of what Levi is saying, but too into the situation on his screen to look away. “But I want to hack back these motherfuckers out of existence.”

Levi looks confused. “How? They could be anywhere at this point.”

“We're going to charge them.”

“I'm not exactly sure what you mean,” Levi says.

Leo types something on his keyboard. Then he extends his hand towards Levi and, for some reason, Levi knows to give him the USB cable he needed. “Right now,” he explains, eyes still staring at the wall of coding in front of his eyes, “they are attacking us and they're expecting us to defend ourselves. That's the game they set and that we've been playing so far. We are going to change the rules. Instead of defending this place, in response to the next attack we're going to attack back.”

“How?” 

Leo smirks. “You're going to rewrite the Apache so that it can keep them out on its own for just a little while. And while it does that, me and you are going to drop a bomb on them. I've got just the thing,” he turns around on his chair and he locks eyes with Blaine. “Blaine, can you do me a favor? Get Cody here with my lucky charm flash drive. Tell him it's in his teddy bear.”

“I will pretend that what you just said is perfectly normal,” Blaine says as he grabs his phone and calls Cody.

“It's a virus,” Leo goes on, this time speaking to Levi. “Not mine, but I trust the people who made it. It's going to attach to their code and move upstream to their computer. They called it Salmon. It's genius, isn't it?”

“But we're gonna risk integrity,” Levi protests. “The whole system relies on the Apache now. If I change it, it might collapse.”

“Yes, that's exactly the point,” Leo nods. “The system will be unstable and that will catch them off guard. While they're trying to understand what is going on, we release the Salmon. The moment it's in, we unplug their box and you rewrite back the Apache, stabilizing the system from which they are now cut off.”

Levi's expression is half fascination, half _this guy is crazy_. “How do you know they've not predicted it already?”

“Because they think it's you people and you're boring,” Leo says. “They are counting on the fact that you would never do something like that and jeopardize your own system.”

“Yeah, and there's a reason for that,” Levi says in shock. “If we miscalculate our window or if we get even one piece of code wrong, we're going to be exposed.”

“You're lucky, then, that I'm really really good at math and coding,” Leo says, easily. “We can do this, Levi. Relax. I've done worse.”

Levi looks like someone who knows he's in it already and can't do anything to avoid that, but he's got doubts and he can't keep them for himself. “Don't take me wrong, I think you're a genius, I'm a great fan—“

“Thanks.”

“—but you kinda worked for the other side up to a year ago,” Levi continues. “And you want to get the FBI mainframe down to save it?”

“I have three things for you. One, I don't work for Evil, capital E. And you're not the good guys, anyway. So the line is a little bit blurry here. Two, I have a code. I don't hop sides. Three, I'm doing this for my friend Matt and I care more about him than I care about taking down the FBI. Vanderbilt promised me that she's gonna clean his records if I save your asses, and you can bet I'm gonna do it.”

Levi looks at him for a very intense minute and then he seems to decide that he believes him. “Fine, I trust you. But we still don't know where the box is.”

“Have a little faith,” Leo rolls his eyes at him, right when the door opens and Cody steps in. “Ah, Sweets, just in time.”

Levi looks up and for a moment he just stares. Either he wasn't expecting anyone, or he wasn't expecting _anyone like Cody_ , which is what usually happens.

Cody walks to Leo's desk, holding a flash drive in the shape of tiny chubby dragon. “I think you wanted this?”

Leo smirks. “I might prefer what's attached to it. He chuckles when Cody blushes. He kisses him to make sure he blushes more.

“Focus, kid,” Blaine sighs.

“I didn't know they were together.”

“Yeah, well, the house is a bit of an hormone-fest right now,” Blaine groans.

“Sounds like hell,” Vanderbilt chuckles.

“You have no idea.”

She taps her earpiece. “They found two boxes that correspond to your description.”

“Uh, alright,” Leo mutters.

“A back up?” Levi suggests. His eyes keep going to Cody and he keeps dragging them away from him, but he's losing this war.

“Possibly,” Leo agrees. “It shouldn't change anything, though. We go on as planned. Vanderbilt, keep two men near the boxes, they need to be ready. Levi, start rewriting the code.”

They stay quiet for a while, each of them busy doing a part of the work. So empty and silent, and with the carcasses of the computers they broke on the ground, the room seems to lie in the aftermath of a hurricane. Blaine and agent Vanderbilt are still in a corner, useless and quite unaware of what's really happening, both quite annoyed because of it.

Blaine considers Leo a great asset and he is used to rely on him for any part of any plan that requires an internet connection. But usually, while he delegates that part of the plan to Leo, he has tons of other things to do that, in most cases, only he can do. Right now, his presence here feels quite pointless and he doesn't like the feeling of that. He finds out that he agrees with Vanderbilt, he would have preferred a bomb. Even if he has no more idea of how to dispose of a bomb than he has of how you stop an hacker from stealing your data.

Eventually, Leo looks up again. “Alright, get ready, we start in two minutes,” he announces.

“When did you calculate the time intervals between the attacks?” Levi asks, baffled.

“While you were questioning my loyalty, I'm also good at multitasking,” Leo grins. “Are you ready?”

“Yes. All done.”

“Five... four... three... two...” Leo's eyes are glued to the screen, looking for something specific in that curtains of words and numbers. “Levi, change the code!”

Blaine expects Levi to just press a button, but he has, in fact, to write something. After that, they just wait. Strings of codes run one after the other on their screen until there's only a wall of text, scrolling up one line at the time.

“The RX program is down,” Levi announces.

“Wait.”

“The auxiliary mainframe is not responding,” Levi goes on two minutes later, his voice struggling to hide concern.

“They are testing the system,” Leo reads on his screen. “Their codes are not working either.”

“It's giving me errors,” Levi insists, closing black window after black window.

“We still have time,” Leo responds calmly. “Hang on. I want them to reboot. They're wondering why the system is freaking out this time.”

Levi types in quickly, but his computer just beeps in a very unfriendly way. “It's shutting down!”

“And they're locked in with us,” Leo puts the flash drive in and they can all see a loading bar taking up half his screen. The moment the bar reaches the other end, Leo turns on his chair again. “Vanderbilt, tell your men to rip those boxes off the wall.”

Agent Vanderbilt repeats the order through her earpiece. Nothing seems to happen, but it doesn't look like Levi or Leo were expecting anything. “Give them time to notice,” Leo says, “Just a moment.”

“I need to put the Apache back in.”

Leo stares at the screen, looking for something. He can see their actions through their lines of code as if they were on camera. The panicked corrections, the furious pinging, every single angry attempt to keep attacking when they don't have their claws in the system anymore. “Put it back,” he finally says, while Levi is one step away from having a breakdown.

“What are we doing?” Agent Vanderbilt asks, confused.

“We're waiting for your system to come back on,” Leo says, his eyes glued to the screen. “They are definitely cut off, but so are we.”

“What? You cut us off the system?”

“Temporarily,” Leo says calmly. “It's like turning off and on your computer. It needs to load everything back up again. Give it time, it's a nice little beast that you have here.”

Agent Vanderbilt looks at him in utter shock. She's possibly questioning all her life choices right now. “What if they get in again while we can't?”

Leo sighs, finding his paper cup and taking a sip. “Their computers are currently short-circuiting, ours are not. I think it's fair to say we're gonna get there first.”

For exactly sixty seconds no one moves.

Then, suddenly, the room seems to come alive as the wall of screens turn on, and Levi and Leo's computers emit a very friendly beep.

“Yes!” Leo screams, throwing both his arms in the air. “The master won again! Suck it, bitches!”

Levi, on the contrary, hugs his computer and rests his forehead against the keyboard, sighing in relief. “I need a vacation.”

“What happened? Is it over?”

Leo pulls Cody on his lap and turns around on his office chair a couple of times. “Yes, but your systems need an upgrade, Vanderbilt. They are good, but they could be better. Also, they are old and hackers don't do old.”

Cody looks up at him and Leo can't resist and kisses him again. “You actually do,” he says, nodding towards Blaine.

Leo bursts out laughing.

*

Twenty minutes later – after a quick briefing with everyone of importance – they're finally heading towards the exit. The effects of caffeine are long gone, and Leo is starting to feel the withdrawal.

“It was a real pleasure to work with you,” Levi says, shaking his hand. “I really am a fan. I've read a lot of great things on your works.”

“Vanderbilt told me it's a long dossier.”

Levi shakes his head. “No, not what _she_ knows.”

“Oh,” Leo chuckles. “That dossier is even longer, then.”

“We could use someone like you, you know?”

Leo shrugs. “I'm you but illegal, remember?” He points at himself. “Besides, I don't work well with authority and the authority doesn't work well with me taking pills. It'd be a very short marriage with a probably bloody divorce. Better to spare the kids.”

“Right.” Levi chuckles. “But if you change your mind...”

“Leo, are you coming?” Cody calls him.

Leo see the change in Levi's eyes, the way they linger on Cody a little more than they should, how the look in them gets warmer and a little bit lost. He has seen that look before and, out of his own eyes, he doesn't like it.

It's better if they go home before he starts another war.

And not a virtual one this time.


End file.
